Where a recovering ex-atheist skewers things with a sharp two-edged sword

Why do atheists think prayer studies prove anything?

2 minutes to read How could any educated person think that prayer studies have a hope of being scientific, let alone of producing meaningful results?

A new atheist teenager recently linked a friend of mine to www.godisimaginary.com, where the first “proof” of God’s nonexistence is that he doesn’t answer prayers, and the second is that scientific, statistical analysis of prayer shows it has no effect on events.

Now, pretty much any Christian knows from experience that God answers prayers—and the longer you’ve been a Christian the more obvious it is because the pattern of providence starts to emerge in your life. So as far as convincing believers to throw in the towel, this seems like a pretty misguided place to start.

But it’s really much worse than that, because when you sit down to think of an analogy to prayer studies, you quickly realize how bizarre the idea even is. So while this website extols the virtues of intelligent, critical, rational, scientific thought, the first thing it does is use an unintelligent, uncritical, irrational and unscientific “proof”. Par for the course, I’m afraid.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine running a study on the effectiveness of letter-writing campaigns to the prime minister, where:

There’s no way to check whether the letter-writers stamped their envelopes, or even addressed them correctly

The control group is comprised of many people whose friends and family might write letters on their behalf without the knowledge of either them or the scientists running the study

The prime minister has already stated unequivocally that not all letters will be answered in the way that their writers hope (nor within the timeframe of the study)

The prime minister already knows every detail of what he is going to do, and even knows that he will do much of it to honor some of the letters he receives

And he is fully aware of which letters are part of the study to test his response

It’s hard to imagine anyone seriously thinking such a study would be worthwhile, let alone scientific. It’s even harder to imagine an intelligent, critical, rational and scientific person seriously suggesting that the results of such a study prove anything about the efficacy of letter-writing campaigns.

Yet when it comes to running a study on whether a supreme intellect with a highly detailed plan responds to requests in the same way as a vending machine or some other regulated process, that’s a slam dunk?

…sounds like a somewhat uncritical, irrational and unscientific stance from which to criticise something for being uncritical, irrational and unscientific

Hey Peter, could you elaborate on what you mean here? In what sense are Christians being uncritical and irrational when they discern patterns in their lives which seem obviously providential? I agree this isn’t scientific, of course, but if that’s a problem you should explain why.

If this is the case, perhaps we could devise a scientific study that measures these factors over a long period of time, using a very large and diverse cohort?

Well, I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe you could. Do you have any ideas for how such a study would be structured, what sorts of metrics it would look for, etc?

FecitMMXVIII Dominic Bnonn Tennant. Articulations of theology and poor taste on this blog are my own, and not that of my church. Auto-generated Bible popups are taken from the Lexham English Bible unless otherwise noted. Quoted passages are taken from whichever translation I find most accurate (or my own if I don't like any of them).